Buying Tekelec, Oracle Moves Further Toward Telecom

Yesterday Oracle announced that it is acquiring another networking vendor, demonstrating that it's quite serious about moving into the telecom world. They are buying Tekelec, which specializes in network signaling, policy control, and subscriber management.

The deal comes just a month after Oracle's purchase of Acme Packet for $1.7B, which is still pending yet. Once they finish closing both, Oracle will be integrating the two product portfolios into their overall communications offerings.

When you put Acme Packet's VoIP session border controllers alongside Tekelec's signaling and policy control, Oracle's plans start to look less opaque. They are clearly building a portfolio aimed at enabling the delivery of applications over IP networks that require special treatment to maintain quality.

Mostly that means they're positioning themselves to help service providers get more out of that last wireless mile bottleneck. After all, even if spectrum were plentiful, things are getting more and more complex every day with no end in sight at that end of the network.

Since the applications involved are increasingly cloud-driven, Oracle's combined portfolio (servers, virtualization & cloud, databases, business applications, and now last mile traffic shaping) cover a coherent data ecosystem. They're expecting services providers to need increasingly more sophisticated tools to manage their data traffic, as simply throwing bandwidth at problems has its limits.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, one can get a general idea of the size of the purchase from the fact that Siris Capital Group took Tekelec private in January 2012 for $780M. In 2011, Tekelec did in the neighborhood of $400M in revenue.